Cocaine Impairs Athletes' Judgment

February 9, 1986|By Barry Cooper of the Sentinel Staff

With alarming headlines leaping from our sports pages almost daily, it is easy to get the feeling that more and more professional athletes are blowing it -- cocaine, that is. This alluring drug, so dangerous and yet so cherished, has nearly as much destructive potential as an A-bomb, as much cunning as one of Thomas Hearns' jabs. Soon, all of pro sports will be set up for a knockout punch unless all-out war is waged on the sultry powder known as ''The Sweet Lady.''

Trouble is, we don't know if the players really want to be rid of what many of them perceive to be a good thing.

For some players, daily use of cocaine is an escape, a way to disappear into a never-never land away from prying eyes of the media, the pain of trying to play with injuries and the insecurity of knowing that careers could be nearing an end.

Just how addictive is cocaine? Experiments conducted on monkeys brought chilling revelations. Once they were hooked on cocaine, the monkeys turned down everything offered them except the drug. They forgot all about food, water, recreation, even sex. All they wanted was another high.

Was it that kind of sickening drive that forced New Jersey Nets star Micheal Ray Richardson back into the drug world? Did it lure Walter Davis of the Phoenix Suns? How about all the New England Patriots who are said to have at least dabbled at drug abuse?

Suddenly, all the wrong messages are being sent to our youths. We have to hope that our youngsters will emulate their heroes only on the playing field -- not in real life.

The white powder already has worked its way into colleges. Quarterback Tony Robinson, a promising pro prospect at the University of Tennessee, will go on trial after being arrested on charges of selling the stuff.

Robinson's problems notwithstanding, it is most often the top pro athletes, the ones who command the big salaries, who succumb to drug abuse.

That is not hard to understand. Imagine, if you will, picking up a paycheck every two weeks for say, $8,000. That's the kind of money Houston Rockets star John Lucas was making in his heyday, and it was that kind of financial freedom that may have driven him to repeated bouts with cocaine addiction.

That much money -- most top players earn from $200,000 to $2 million a year -- makes the athletes easy targets for drug pushers. On the West Coast, it is known that drug dealers regularly stake out the hotels of visiting NBA teams. Some pushers reportedly even travel from one major-league city to another, always staying one step ahead of the law but in tune with all the drug needs of their athletic clients.

During the baseball drug trial in Pittsburgh last summer, we saw where one enterprising drug dealer even operated a mail-order service. When the players were away in the off-season, all they had to do was make a call, and the dealer would promptly rush to the post office with a package of dope to be sent by overnight mail. Talk about pony express.

Sure, there always will be professional teams to cheer. No matter how severe the drug problem becomes, there always will be a new wave of athletic talent ready. But what about the people who watch games? Will John Q. Public continue to shell out big bucks to see drugged men play kids' games? Probably not.

The real victims, though, are the players themselves. You have to wonder when they will learn. After all, the average length of service for a player in the National Football League is about five seasons. The turnover in the NBA can be even quicker.

But the players seem bent on determining their own destiny even if it takes them down the tubes. Just recently, former NFL great Gene Upshaw came out against the voluntary drug-testing plan adopted by the New England Patriots.

Upshaw, a star with the Oakland Raiders and now executive director of the National Football League Players' Association, says such tests would violate the players' collective-bargaining agreement.

Hogwash.

We do not need to force ourselves into a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo to determine if it would be fair to ask the players to submit to voluntary drug testing. After all, it is their lives we are trying to protect.